I've been reading Keats like crazy the last few weeks. I just got done reading the love letters he wrote to Fanny Brawne. I'm wondering what kind of writer she was, she must have been pretty good because the two of them fell in love mostly through letter writing & he didn't believe in love before her. With a sensitive soul like he had, devoted to beauty, I'm convinced she must have been pretty good with words to cause him to fall so in love with her. Sadly, all the letters she wrote him were buried with him so we can't know for sure.

People say that Keats was courageous because he was intelligent & could have gone into medicine, he would have had a good income, but he gave it up to be a poet. Well, the last few days I've been questioning if that was actually a courageous choice on his part. I mean if he had gone into medicine he wouldn't have been walking in the cold, without a good warm coat, so he wouldn't have gotten consumption & he wouldn't have died. Couldn't he have gone into medicine & still wrote poetry as well? People say that he had exceptional talent as poet but died so young, that he was unable to develop his writing enough for us to know how truly great he could have become. So if he had lived longer, what would he have been? On the other hand, had he not been living the live of a poor poet, could he have become even as great a writer as he did become? I mean, first of all, it is known that his poetry improved the most, in the short time that he knew & loved Fanny Brawne so it could be argued that it was loving her that made him great, it was the experience of the great passion he felt for her. But had he not been living as a poor poet, would he have ever even come into contact with her to fall in love with her? If he had met her & fell in love with her he could have just married her & lived out his days with her, the Dr felt that his consumption was made worse by "love frustration", so even if he had gotten consumption, as a Dr married to Brawne he may have even lived longer because he wouldn't have been all stuck at home worried that she was going out to parties, dancing & flirting with other men. But would he have become a great poet without the torture of unfufilled love

Could John Keats have been the greatest of the poets had he lived a different life? Or was he the great poet he was because he lived the life he did live? What do you think?